An Enhanced Spatial Smoothing Technique With Esprit Algorithm For Direction Of Arrival Estimation In Coherent Scenarios

Subspace-based methods suffer from the rank loss of the noise free data covariance matrix in the context of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation of coherent sources. The well-known spatial smoothing techniques are then widely employed to create a rank restored data covariance matrix. However, conventional spatial smoothing techniques, such as the spatial smoothing pre-processing (SSP), modified spatial smoothing pre-processing (MSSP), improved spatial smoothing (ISS), do not make full use of the available information in the data covariance matrix. In this paper, an enhanced spatial smoothing (ESS) technique is proposed to exploit both the covariance matrices of individual subarrays and the cross-covariance matrices of different subarrays. Besides, the proposed method can work directly on the signal subspace (ESS-SS), since the signal subspace contains all the information of the DOAs of incoming signals. After de-correlation, the subspace method ESPRIT is adopted to estimate the DOAs. Compared with conventional approaches, the proposed method is more powerful to de-correlate the correlation between signals, and also more robust to the noise impact. The proposed method is tested on numerical data in coherent scenarios, compared with conventional approaches. Simulation results show that the proposed method has an enhanced resolving capability and a lower signal-to-noise ratio threshold.